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The Evernote Site Memory Button

Since the beginning we’ve been focused on one thing: making it trivially easy for you to remember all the stuff you love. It turns out that you really love saving webpages—it’s the most popular note type in Evernote. So, today we’re announcing something that makes saving webpages an integrated part of your browsing experience.

For the first time ever, we’re releasing a feature designed exclusively for site owners and publishers. It’s called Evernote Site Memory and it’s really cool.

What is the Site Memory button?

The Evernote Site Memory button embeds a mini version of Evernote onto your pages. As the name suggests, the button gives your website a memory—like getting an incredibly powerful favorite function, without the implementation headaches. Whether you run a blog, news outlet, storefront, or corporate site, here’s what Site Memory can do for you:

1. Total clipping control

By placing the Site Memory button on your site, you will control precisely what is saved into your visitors’ Evernote accounts. As part of the button customization, you define what region of a page is clipped and the title of the resulting note. You can suggest tags to accompany the note, as well as the destination notebook for the clip. You can even have your clips include automatic headers, footers, links, and attributions. In other words, you can make pages clipped from your site look great.

2. Entire clipping history without leaving your site

When a visitor click the Site Memory button, a popup opens. That popup serves two functions. First, it lets them save the page, as described above. Second, and maybe more interestingly, it shows visitors everything they have ever clipped from your domain. Ever. Right inside the popup. Visitors just click on the green tab. They can browse through a thumbnailed list of their favorite content from your site—just like an automatic Best Of list. Even notes that were made using our browser extensions prior to you placing the Site Memory button on the page will show up in the results. Once they find the note they’re looking for, your visitors click and jump to the original page.

Clipping = loyalty

Take a look at your web clips and you’ll probably discover that the vast majority are from a small handful of sites. Saving webpages is akin to placing a personal seal of approval on the content. You like it. You want to refer to it later. You save it. You’ll come back to the site for more. Evernote Site Memory is the perfect complement to sharing buttons (Facebook Like, Tweet Button). Those bring more readers to your content, while Evernote helps foster lasting relationships with readers.

Ok, from a user’s perspective gave this a try from this page and then used my nomrla Evernote Clipper button in Firefox. Clearly the resulting benefit to users is a much better looking note. However, I am concerned that
(a) the Site Memory dialog don’t tell you what “page region” customisation the website has implemented so I’m not going to know for certain that I’ve clipped all the content I want without checking the Note. That’s an extra few steps and a good reason to not use it to clip content to Evernote; and
(b) developers can put in extra content – would this be content that doesn’t appear on the page being clipped but that’s added to the Note (eg extra links)?

In both cases, I have reservations as a user. My Evernote is MY memory, not the website I’m clipping from…

Daryl, you bring up a really good point. Our goal in creating Site Memory is to give publishers to ability to create a better experience than what would be possible with the regular web clippers. Site owners can add styling, attributions and links to clips from their site–a good example of this is the Fuel Your Creativity implementation (http://www.fuelyourcreativity.com/the-graphic-designers-guide-to-pricing-estimating-budgeting-book-giveaway/).

We suggest that sites use this capability judiciously, and only to enhance the clipped content. Ultimately, if you’re unhappy with how the Site Memory button is set up, you can always use your browser web clipper. Our hope is that site owners will focus on making a great experience for their visitors.

Perhaps, an enhancement to the process will be to give users a preview of what the site will clip. There’s a “Clips from xx notebook (xx)” tab – adding a “Preview” tab beside that (for example) will enhance the overall user experience.

When I used the Site Memory button on this post I chose the “Close when done” button so didn’t realise that there was a preview of the clipped content shown after the content had been clipped.

Of course, I’ll use the Site Memory button for those sites who are my “trusted” sites and who implement it, as the layout of the note is *far superior* to the vanilla clip created with the web clipper.

Andrew, following on Daryl’s user experience question, can you confirm that the site doesn’t have access to any of the EN notes, account information, or other personally identifiable information for the EN user who clicks the site memory button?

In an effort to see what this looks like, I used the “clip to Evernote” link on your blog & all I got (after sync’ing down from the Evernote servers) was a link to your blog. Is that what you’d intended?

Brilliant tool! We’ve added it to iStyles.com (for example, on the product page of http://www.istyles.com/drama-iphone-skin-p-40104.html ) so that customers can remember designs that they like and compare them easily. We’ve got more than 40000 Skins and one of the single most requested feature is the ability to compare selected items to help narrow down the choice of design and here it is, with Evernote’s Site Memory Button.

FYI, I don’t think people are testing this to be sure they’ve implemented it correctly. I tried three different web sites that are listed in the comments. The only one of the three that clipped any content was Matthew Guay’s.

It’s a clever idea guys and quite a new venture. I imagine if this takes off like fb like button of tweet button, it does a whole lot of good for Evernote. Very smart business move and hey, very useful for everyone else.

As a site owner, if I put this on my pages what metrics/analytics do I get? I’m not asking for identifiable information about users, but will I know how many times a page has been clipped using the button for example?

@Daryl–you have it right. I don’t care for the publisher’s ability to add superfluous material, nor the lack of an indicator on whether you clip a selection, the whole [age, or just the page’s URL. Still, this doesn’t suck, and it makes a good first step. The affiliate program makes a nice touch.

If you are looking for a plugin that integrates Evernote’s new Site Memory feature into your website, check out the one that I developed:
http://www.slocumstudio.com/2010/09/evernote-site-memory-plugin-for-wordpress/
It does all the dirty work for you. No need to touch any HTML, CSS, PHP or JavaScript.

Read the wordpress instructions through 4 times and while I’m not the most tech savvy guy in the world, I’m far from a tech ignoramus. It suffered from what most of these things do around the net – it’s written for someone with more than a basic understanding of what to do with the terms given.

Just added Site Memory to my employee scheduling service at schedule-my-employees.com

This will make it much easier for managers and employees to save their schedules to Evernote.
Overall it works well. Two things I noticed is that when the link is clicked, there can be a significant delay with out any progress indicator. Once you know to wait, the delay is not too bad, but for new users, they may think the feature is broken and give up. Also, some tables lost the vertical border lines that rendered fine on the original page. Not sure what is going on here but the Evernote page was still very readable so not a show stopper.

Although this feature is great, the entire work-around of offering a print-friendly clipping using the contentURL is counter web standards and requires an additional trip to the server. Wouldn’t it be possible to have an extra styling value named ‘print’ and then to grab the page layout according to a print media specific stylesheet? This would utilise W3C standards and good design and coding practices.

For the rest, an awesome future… a bit much compared to the standard social bookmark links containing all the variables, but then again, this gives the user more control and actually clips the page as.

As a user, I much prefer browser extensions, like shareaholics (right in my addressbar!) or clipmarks …or bookmarklets, like amplify or diigolet. It’s the user who wants to decide what to clip …and clicking on a paragraph or an image really isn’t that hard.

But I do understand the reasonable marketing effort behind this …and if content providers chose to equip their page with it, why not.

JM, whenever you clip something from a site, Evernote captures the URL the page. The Site Memory plug-in requires you to log into your Evernote account and it then does a search of your Evernote account for any notes clipped from the domain that you are visiting. The information is not shared with the site owner.

Very useful little piece of code, though I discovered (after having integrated it on the full site) that Evernote is also in the SHARE button next to from AddThis. But it’s good to let people know about Evernote and to let Evernote users know they can CLIP the page

I had some trouble understanding the “Content” tag, probably could be explained more for dummies (or people in a hurry). I noticed my java menu is added in the buttom of the clipped pages and I’m sure there is a way to avoid that if I understood it better.